India Internet News
Google Discontinues Realtime Search After Twitter Deal Expired
06 July 2011
Google has temporarily stopped its Realtime Search feature after the expiry of an agreement with Twitter.
A Google representative made a statement which says, "Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2." He also added, "Twitter has been a valuable partner for nearly two years, and we remain open to exploring other collaborations in the future."
Google said it no longer has access to a special feed of Twitter tweets, but they also added that "information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google."
The Internet search giant, Google announced it was temporarily stopping real-time search results in a Monday post on its @googlerealtime Twitter feed.
"We've temporarily disabled google.com/realtime," they said. "We're exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned." The Google representative informed us that "Google's vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other real-time data from a variety of sources."
Google publicly introduced Google+, its long-awaited social networking initiative, last week. At present, it is available by invitation only.
Google+ let users to separate online friends and family in various "Circles" and to share information only with members of a particular circle.
As per SearchEngineLand.com technology blog, which first reported the disappearance of Google Real Time Search, Google used a variety of other sources for real-time updates except for Twitter posts. This includes Google News links, MySpace updates, Facebook fan page updates and results from user-generated Q&A site Quora.
Twitter continues to provide its real-time feed of tweets to Bing, the rival search engine by Microsoft.